NBA

Lin lifting a once helpless Knicks lineup

TRANSFORMED: Before Jeremy Lin hit the starting lineup, Tyson Chandler, Carmelo Anthony, Landry Fields and the Knicks’ bench wasn’t as enthusiastic as it has been lately.

TRANSFORMED: Before Jeremy Lin hit the starting lineup, Tyson Chandler, Carmelo Anthony, Landry Fields and the Knicks’ bench wasn’t as enthusiastic as it has been lately. (Anthony J. Causi)

We aren’t just a basketball city, we are a point guard city. Indiana is where kids step off their combines and drill 200 jumpers on baskets nailed to barns before breakfast.

Other states pump out centers, other cities specialize in forwards.

We’re about the playmakers, always have been. We’re Bob Cousy of Astoria and Tiny Archibald of the South Bronx, Dean “The Dream” Meminger from Rice and Pearl Washington of Boys and Girls and Kenny Anderson, out of LeFrak City and Archbishop Molloy. We are Frankie Alagia for St. John’s, Clyde Frazier for the Knicks, even Jason Kidd for a time at our satellite campus in North Jersey.

That doesn’t explain all of the Jeremy Lin phenomenon, or even most of it. But it helps add to the fascination of what he has done and where he’s doing it, and the obsession about what he needs to do now, as the city breathlessly awaits Carmelo Anthony’s return to the Knicks lineup.

“Here’s what I am going to be interested to see,” Kenny Smith said yesterday. “I want to see his ability to tell teammates, ‘No.’ There are times when you’re a point guard and you have guys open and you say to yourself, ‘No, not here,’ or ‘No, not now, not yet.’ We focus on the plays they make. But being a great point guard what’s almost as important are the plays you don’t make. And knowing what the difference is.”

Smith, of course, is a prominent link in our civic point-guard chain, who played under two of the very best to ever coach the game — Jack Curran at Molloy, Dean Smith at North Carolina — and then won a pair of matching championship rings with the Rockets in 1994 and 1995.

Last night, on TNT, he served as the commissioner of the draft of first- and second-year players for the Rising Stars Challenge next Friday, one team picked by Charles Barkley, one by Shaquille O’Neal, one name that was conspicuously absent until just before the show, when Lin was added to the list of sophomores and Norris Cole to the rookies.

“I’m starting a petition,” Smith had said earlier in the day with a laugh, a few hours before Shaq took him with his third selection.

Next weekend is for the fun and fantasy of Orlando’s All-Star Game. This weekend the business at hand will be dramatically more important at the Garden, and Smith understands why. When he was running the show in Houston, there were hundreds of times when Hakeem Olajuwon or Clyde Drexler would be howling for the ball, unhappy when Smith disagreed and went elsewhere.

“But that’s all a part of the job, you have to let them know that you know what’s best,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s just a facial expression. But it’s important that they know they can trust you, that there’s a reason why they may be open but it’s the better play to go somewhere else. And that they know you’ll be going back to them soon enough.”

So much of Anthony’s time as a Knick has been spent without a true point guard at his side. Chauncey Billups was banged up late last season, and Toney Douglas and Iman Shumpert were asked to play out of position this year. Lin has changed everything about not only how the Knicks play, but how they’re perceived.

“You look at the Knicks now, they’re all high-fives and people picking each other up and laughing, even the guys on the bench,” Smith said. “Now look at, say, Charlotte, how joyless they are even after a basket. Two weeks ago, that was the Knicks.”

He laughed.

“Amazing what a point guard can do, isn’t it?” he said laughing the laugh of a man who played the position with distinction for 25 years, providing the answer without having to say it.